Camera

Camera / Eva-Marie Liffner
trans. from the Swedish by Anna Paterson
London: Vintage, 2004.
199 p.

This was a chance find at a thrift shop last month, and I just had to buy it! I've never heard of this author before, but the story sounded fascinating. 

Johanna is a Swedish photographer who has lived and worked around the world. Her Uncle Jacob, whom she was close to, was also a photographer, but has died at an advanced age, leaving her his flat in Sweden and all his belongings. 

She finds a mysterious box of photos tucked away in his effects, and it spurs her to investigate where they came from and what they mean. This requires travelling to London, England, as that is where Jacob worked for many years, starting in 1905. 

The book moves back and forth between Jacob's story & Johanna's, but the tone doesn't change at all; the narrative voice is constant no matter the era or character. It can be briefly confusing at the beginning until you get used to the quick switches and can tell whose story is underway. 

But the idea is that both their stories and lives are so enmeshed -- they are both photographers, they are both gay but keep it mostly to themselves (especially Jacob for obvious reasons, it's 1905), and they seem to have the same phlegmatic, solitary natures. 

As Johanna pushes further into the history of these photos, a sordid tale reveals itself. Jacob was apprenticed to Hubert Burrows, who photographed sessions of the Theosophist Society. One of its members is the Rev. Charles Leadbeater, who is trying to capture photographs of the human soul...by photographing young boys as they are dying. And by photographing young children for other darker purposes as well. 

Inspired by a true story of Victorian/Edwardian photography and early child pornography rings, Liffner takes the bones of an historical story and creates a narrative which brings up ethics, culpability, patriarchy and power, and evokes a smoky turn of the century London. I found the historical sections a little more interesting, as that is where most of the action happens. 

While the characters remain a bit of a cipher (the story is not about digging into their psyches) the story is taut and has a feel of reportage, with the inclusion of newspaper articles, excerpts from Johanna's reading, archives and history. While those elements are just sprinkled in, it gives the flavour of Johanna's investigation into her uncle's past. There is also a brief epilogue in which the author notes which parts of the story have a basis in fact. 

It's a quiet book despite the shocking truths that are uncovered. It's evenly paced, with each chapter broken into brief sections, and the idea of what we can truly know permeates the story. As Johanna says in the end,

It is true, though, that you can never learn, or even remember, everything.